Next project: facebook plugin for picasa for ubuntu

The Facebook plugin for Picasa in Ubuntu is not satisfactory to me. Someday I'll take some time to poke around in it and try to improve it. Or write my own.

Although right now I'm buried in TWU reading.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1093761

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=2483740875&topic=3457

Chromium OS (I has it)

I attended a session at Google Chicago about HTML5 and especially the new Chromium OS.

Slides presented are here: http://slides.html5rocks.com/#landing-slide

The sell of the presentation was twofold- one, HTML5 has built-in everything previously accomplished with tiresome individual repetition... and two, that he did the whole thing on an onstage- just-unboxed Chromium netbook.

Then, midway through the presentation, the presenter (whose identity I don't actually know yet!) announced that everyone in the room would be getting a new Chromium netbook. I may have said "What??" somewhat loudly.

And indeed, after the presentation everyone stood in line and signed a terms of agreement (in a google form), we were each handed a beautiful box. In fact, I'm typing on it now.

Dozens of people are probably doing in-depth analyses of their new hardware just this moment, and I don't need to join their ranks. It's hardware version Cr-48, has 2MB of RAM, and you get to the terminal with ctrl-alt-T (and exit with "exit" ...there's ssh! But no man pages, or really anything. No built-in dev tools. But the browser has a nice pseudo-firebug debugging extension, which you summon using ctrl-shift-J.

To get and change the keyboard mapping, use ctrl-alt-/

ctrl-n is a new window.

forward delete is alt-backspace

to switch windows, alt-tab

In chromium, to see tak manager go to shift-esc

got to about:flags to see some awesome experiments.

I'm now inspired to:

Write in HTML5 because it is beautiful and useful

play excessively with my new netbook

Buy a goddamn cover for the netbook because every laptop needs a protective case

So far my annoyances with the netbook include:

No end or home keys, or anything that maps to them

No forward-delete key

You can't really develop code on it. Ruby, Python, or anything else... i.e. no native support for it. Need that!

Too much awesomeness to handle! :)

Edit: The speaker was Ian Fette, as in https://code.google.com/u/ian@chromium.org/updates

Books (novels)

Books I've read recently:

Miles Errant by Lois McMaster Bujold
It was very good. I went through it in two evenings and poof it was awesome. Charismatic underdog takes on governments and corporations in a war-scifi world and wins.

The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary by Eric S. Raymond
He makes sense of hacker culture. Which I thought was impossible. Win.

The Caryatids by Bruce Sterling
Crazy crazy cyberpunk post-apocalyptic scifi.

Euler (more, again)

Today I solved Euler 25 and 48. Neither were particularly hard although I did have an integer offset fail incident for each of them.

25. http://pastie.org/1366169 problem here: http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=problems&id=25

28. http://pastie.org/1366176 problem here: http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=problems&id=48

I'm going in order of difficulty, not number order. Which is why my numbers are out of order.

Euler is a good way to distract myself from stuff sometimes.

Passwords

I have a separate password for

1. sites that don't have my credit information and which I use rarely.
2. sites that don't have my credit information but which I use often
3. sites that do have my credit information but which I use rarely
4. sites that do have my credit information and which I use often
5. facebook
6. twitter
7. google
8. laptop partition 1
9. laptop partition 2

Really not that hard. I change # 4-7 every semester, and sometimes more often than that, depending...

Some sites want a password with one lowercase, one uppercase, one number... etc. Sometimes I wonder if they check that with regex and whether I could escape the regex and borkenize their somethings. ...A quick bit of research shows that Delicious is immune to my clumsy regexes. Curses, foiled.

Funny fact: Delicious insists on more password security than my bank does.

Cthulhu snowflake

Okay, so the whole Star Wars snowflake thing made me jealous, so I stole some of my roommate's scrap printing paper and tried to make some. It was fun but not all that successful, so then I made a Cthulhu one which I like much better. (Why are there no patterns for this on the internet? It makes me sad. Also, celtic knotwork paper snowflakes.)

Pics of all attempts here. http://picasaweb.google.com/wordymusic/Blogflakes?authkey=Gv1sRgCLSB1KXcvMP6SQ# Cthulhu below.

Note: I need to try to make one of these. http://twitpic.com/3guwfq

CS books I haven't finished yet

I keep skipping from book to book and finishing none of them. But the one on top is almost done.

Pics of my hardware projects

In differing stages of completion and success. Full album here, highlights below.http://picasaweb.google.com/wordymusic/Hardware?authkey=Gv1sRgCNGjpZ7r7behZQ#

I nuked my GRUB again

I was in the middle of updates, but then had to pass through a security setup with a "power off everything..." rule in a hurry, so I ended up pulling my battery and having all kinds of strange crap on startup. Eh, at least I know what I'm doing this time.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2

/boot/grub/menu.lst

Backed up the auto-generated grub to menu-old.lst (oops, guess I rewrote the backup from last time)

Current grub is here:

default 0

timeout 60

title Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS, kernel 2.6.32-26-generic-pae (64-bit)

uuid 97da0f78-1a67-4dfa-9239-70cf44363b26

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-26-generic-pae root=UUID=97da0f78-1a67-4dfa-9239-70cf44363b26 ro quiet

initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-26-generic-pae

title Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS, kernel 2.6.32-26-generic-pae (64-bit recovery mode)

uuid 97da0f78-1a67-4dfa-9239-70cf44363b26

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-26-generic-pae root=UUID=97da0f78-1a67-4dfa-9239-70cf44363b26 ro single

initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-26-generic-pae

title Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS, kernel 2.6.32-24-generic (32-bit)

uuid 97da0f78-1a67-4dfa-9239-70cf44363b26

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-25-generic root=UUID=97da0f78-1a67-4dfa-9239-70cf44363b26 ro

initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-25-generic

title Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS, kernel 2.6.32-24-generic (32-bit recovery mode)

uuid 97da0f78-1a67-4dfa-9239-70cf44363b26

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-24-generic root=UUID=97da0f78-1a67-4dfa-9239-70cf44363b26 ro single

initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-24-generic

title Windows 7

root (hd0,0)

savedefault

makeactive

chainloader +1

Infographics

I like infographics a lot. Someday my walls may be covered in them. I've been reading a bit about how various people make them. ...In short it comes down to getting and learning to use Illustrator, which is expensive and has a long learning curve for true expertise.

There are some really good freeware pseudo-Illustrator ports, and there's no time to start learning like the present... and it'll keep my mind off of my exciting governmental office treasure hunt tomorrow.